This chapter examines, first, how New Zealand governments have used the past to represent refugee settlement and multicultural nation-building policies. Second, it examines New Zealand's longstanding humanitarian record of refugee settlement, highlighting how politicians have consistently relied on an idealised version of this record for political purposes, and it discusses aspects of the representation of New Zealand's immigration history after the 1986 review of immigration policy, especially in relation to multicultural policies.

Publication type

Book chapter

Source

Does history matter? Making and debating citizenship, immigration and refugee policy in Australia and New Zealand / Klaus Neumann and Gwenda Tavan (eds.),
pp. 105-123

An earlier draft of this chapter was written for the Governing by Looking Back conference held in 2007 at The Australian National University. It was workshopped at a seminar at the Institute for Social Research, Swinburne University of Technology, in December 2007. The research for this chapter was funded by the Australian Research Council through a grant administered by Swinburne University of Technology.